Three More Weeks...
There's been a lot going on, mostly with our house.
The work on the roof was completed on Friday 24th May. Pretty much the last bit was the application of some serious stuff to discourage the growth of moss. We were advised to keep the cat (who is not ours, but who clearly lives here) under cover because the stuff they use is not good for cats. I shut the cat in the downstairs shower room, and A spent an hour or so in there trying to keep it calm. When the moss treatment was done and we could let the cat back out she took the short way out.
We made use of the scaffolding to paint the outside of the house. Here's a before and an after photo:
I also took advantage of the easy access to the roof to put up a weather system, a new TV antenna, two webcams, and two mount points for amateur radio antennas. One of those already has a VHF co-linear placed on it. The other will provide support for one end of an HF wire antenna.
The weather system is a BloomSky SKY2 with the additional STORM sensor to provide wind and rainfall data. They're just about visible in the "after" photo above on the top left-hand end of the roof. The gimmick for the BloomSky is an fish-eye sky camera which records the sky during daylight hours. I have the camera tilted slightly north so that there's a bit of a horizon along the bottom of the images. If it looked directly up then there'd be quite a bit of greenery on the south side, as we're on the side of a hill, and there's woodland with tall trees above us. Here are a couple of examples:
Inside the house, we've started work on our en-suite bathroom, and the downstairs spare bedroom has been painted. All it now needs is sensible furnishing (and somewhere else for all the boxes to go). My mother's coming over in a fortnight. With luck she'll be able to use it.
I'm a bit closer to getting back on the air, but still having to rely on the Hack Green SDR for GB2CW Morse practice. I've not yet repeated the "perfect copy" at 12 words-per-minute, but I've done it once, so it's no longer something that seems impossible.
The garden has also had a bit of work done on it. I've so far mown the lawn twice, and it looks like I should really try to mow it at least weekly at the monet, or else it gets to the "needs harvesting" stage. A has done a lot of tidying up in the beds, and has planted out some vegetable, though whether we'll be able to keep the bugs and slugs off them long enough to gather a harvest from them remains to be seen.
A couple of weeks back we went to a concert given by the Dursley Male Voice Choir in the Lister Hall. We've been to the venue only once before, quite recently, to see "Made in Dagenham". One of our neighbours is a member of the choir. Their performance was entirely from memory (not a score to be seen) and included "Into The West", which the NMC has done in a slightly different arrangement. It was a very enjoyable evening.
The work on the roof was completed on Friday 24th May. Pretty much the last bit was the application of some serious stuff to discourage the growth of moss. We were advised to keep the cat (who is not ours, but who clearly lives here) under cover because the stuff they use is not good for cats. I shut the cat in the downstairs shower room, and A spent an hour or so in there trying to keep it calm. When the moss treatment was done and we could let the cat back out she took the short way out.
We made use of the scaffolding to paint the outside of the house. Here's a before and an after photo:
I also took advantage of the easy access to the roof to put up a weather system, a new TV antenna, two webcams, and two mount points for amateur radio antennas. One of those already has a VHF co-linear placed on it. The other will provide support for one end of an HF wire antenna.
The weather system is a BloomSky SKY2 with the additional STORM sensor to provide wind and rainfall data. They're just about visible in the "after" photo above on the top left-hand end of the roof. The gimmick for the BloomSky is an fish-eye sky camera which records the sky during daylight hours. I have the camera tilted slightly north so that there's a bit of a horizon along the bottom of the images. If it looked directly up then there'd be quite a bit of greenery on the south side, as we're on the side of a hill, and there's woodland with tall trees above us. Here are a couple of examples:
Inside the house, we've started work on our en-suite bathroom, and the downstairs spare bedroom has been painted. All it now needs is sensible furnishing (and somewhere else for all the boxes to go). My mother's coming over in a fortnight. With luck she'll be able to use it.
I'm a bit closer to getting back on the air, but still having to rely on the Hack Green SDR for GB2CW Morse practice. I've not yet repeated the "perfect copy" at 12 words-per-minute, but I've done it once, so it's no longer something that seems impossible.
The garden has also had a bit of work done on it. I've so far mown the lawn twice, and it looks like I should really try to mow it at least weekly at the monet, or else it gets to the "needs harvesting" stage. A has done a lot of tidying up in the beds, and has planted out some vegetable, though whether we'll be able to keep the bugs and slugs off them long enough to gather a harvest from them remains to be seen.
A couple of weeks back we went to a concert given by the Dursley Male Voice Choir in the Lister Hall. We've been to the venue only once before, quite recently, to see "Made in Dagenham". One of our neighbours is a member of the choir. Their performance was entirely from memory (not a score to be seen) and included "Into The West", which the NMC has done in a slightly different arrangement. It was a very enjoyable evening.